The number of security incidents involving mobile devices has increased over the past year, but companies are not protecting their mobile assets as well as they do other systems. One in three organizations admitted to suffering a compromise due to a...

Digitally transforming enterprises are now able to seamlessly integrate a myriad of service providers and business partners globally through diverse private interconnections. Equinix’s Global Interconnection Index volume 2 (GXI2)...

Networking vendor Juniper Networks has rolled out a new security architecture that will connect and operate with an enterprise customer's existing stack of products.
Named ‘Juniper Connected Security’, the open platform automates...

Rapid digitalisation has resulted in a surge in both the number of endpoints and the means by which cybercriminals can infiltrate enterprise networks. Around the globe, the total financial damage due to cybercrimes is predicted to reach $8 trillion...

Topic

Global supply chains and trade networks are becoming more complex as a result of shifting patterns within the logistics industry, including changing demands of vendors and customers.
In reality, not all businesses are able to navigate these...

Public cloud services are a strategic weapon for CIOs. More than a way to cease operating data centers, the public cloud offers CIOs the ability to focus on strategic projects aimed at boosting the bottom line.
“As organizations pursue new...

Business at the speed of apps – automation to mitigate deployment risks

The inherent objective of enterprise digital transformation
efforts is to innovate faster. In these application-centric
enterprises, modern agile development practices, microservices,
containers and cloud infrastructure are jointly empowering
application developers to build, deploy and update applications
more frequently than ever before.

These practices and strategies have led to a new discipline –
DevOps – that integrates application development and IT
operations at many levels including culture, process workflows,
and infrastructure management, as well as application creation,
test, deployment, and delivery. In a 2018 survey co-sponsored by
F5 and Red Hat on the state of network
automation, 72% of respondents expect their enterprise IT
teams to have adopted DevOps methodologies for at least some of
their development activities within the next 12 months.

DevOps-driven workflows to support production applications also
require network operations (NetOps) teams to rapidly configure,
scale, secure and integrate network infrastructure and Layer 4-7
application services. So, just as the DevOps team must anticipate
and respond to dynamic, ever-changing workload requirements for
flexible capacity, application security, load balancing and
multi-cloud integrations, the NetOps team needs to be as agile
and flexible and be fully empowered to drive network agility.

Both the DevOps and NetOps teams are generally in solid agreement on
the importance of automating delivery and deployment
pipelines to achieve the scale and speed required. Automation
also helps overwhelmed staff to minimize the risk of failing to
ensure the reliability, performance, and security of
applications.

Automation race

This is critical because the IT organizations’ ability to
decrease risks across application portfolio and deployments hold
the key to securing a successful future in the digital era. The
F5-Red Hat survey found that on average, DevOps are ahead of
NetOps in automating components of the deployment pipeline
but NetOps is not that far
behind.

It is worth noting that the current ecosystem of tools and
toolsets are geared toward developers and application
infrastructure while the NetOps ecosystem integrating various
components of the deployment pipeline has hardly been
nurtured.

“One of the reasons DevOps has been so successful is that it’s
comprised primarily of developers,” said Lori MacVittie,
principal technical evangelist at F5 Networks. “They have the
know-how to integrate what needs integrating. NetOps doesn’t
necessarily have that skill set. The deployment pipeline is
comprised primarily of devices and systems that integrate
via protocols.Well-defined, RFC-based protocols
that don't require code-based integration because they were
designed not to.”

This inadequacy has spurred F5 Networks to introduce
its Super-NetOps training
program. The Asia Pacific-first initiative is aimed at
helping businesses and the wider IT industry more effectively
embrace automation, unlock new levels of performance, address
lingering skill gaps and help IT professionals deliver critical
network operations functions through DevOps methodologies. F5 is
expanding the program’s curriculum to include security-focused
automated deployment methodologies for the burgeoning DevSecOps
role as well as application language frameworks and third-party
automation toolchain enablement.

Bridging gaps

Crucially, the Super-NetOps program helps to get previously
siloed NetOps and DevOps teams to collaborate and drive better
business outcomes. The free training helps traditional NetOps
professionals become systems thinkers and service
providers to support the business rather than mere ticket takers
from the developers.

By standardizing services and deliver them through automation
tool-chains, operations teams can collaborate to reduce time to
service from days to minutes. They can automate tasks and
processes, including provisioning of self-service catalogs.

Whether an organization is seeking to automate existing
deployments or integrate into CI/CD pipelines,
such automation and
orchestration also help to reduce exposure to
operational risk.

In this regard, F5 has been enabling shared empowerment between
NetOps and DevOps teammates with its programmable BIG-IP solutions, along with
adjacent technologies such as its container-focused offerings.
Organizations adopting containerized environments to speed app
development can integrate app services, such as routing, SSL
offload, scale, and security, to enable frictionless deployment
and self-service traffic management.

Moving ahead, the NetOps team must build on its decades of
experience deploying, managing, maintaining and securing
applications, and be equipped to deliver the automation and
agility needed by the business. As with the DevOps movement, this
requires NetOps to reassess attitudes
around risk and identifying and removing constraints of
all types: technical, cultural and business process.

DevOps teams have been introducing automation by starting small
and expanding over time. In the same way, NetOps teams need to
learn and benefit from using modern, open automation technologies
first while aligning processes and metrics to better reflect
business priorities and support integrated, collaborative
workflows.